We know from García Márquez himself that the pharmacy of his childhood in Aracataca gave off a valerian aroma, a common smell on the shelves crammed with the pharmacological bottles and containers of the time. The balsamic substances that were usually used gave off fragrances of iodoform, creosote, incense, herbs and other healing products. “The fictions of Gabriel García Márquez are well impregnated with the balsamic smell of old apothecary remedies,” writes the doctor and forensic anthropologist Juan Valentín Fernández de la Gala (1961), who has identified these smells in his search for the medical details and characters in the work of the Colombian writer. In the book The doctors of Macondowhich will be launched in July by the Gabo Foundation at the festival of the same name, supports an idea that led him to an investigation of more than six hundred pages: “Macondo not only began in a pharmacy – the old Barbosa Pharmacy in Aracataca – but it contains a large pharmacy within it.”
De la Gala was a medical student at the University of Seville who attended classes in the mornings and read literature in his free time. His hometown, Campillo de Llerena, Badajoz, is for him a kind of Macondo with less than 2,000 inhabitants located in the deep Extremadura. He came to García Márquez through the stories of Mama Grande’s funeral and The incredible and sad story of Innocent Eréndira and her heartless grandmother. Influenced by his studies, he began to detect scenes and clinical fragments described with special precision in the novels of the author of Litterwho also seemed to reciprocate his interest by introducing medical characters into its pages. “When that happened, like a good methodical student, he would put a small mark in the margin, an exclamation point, a question mark or an underline,” says the author, interviewed in Cartagena de Indias, where he traveled last April for a series of commemorative events for the tenth anniversary of the Nobel Prize winner’s death. Over time, his notes expanded and became a doctoral thesis that kept him for seven years weaving together clinical and literary knowledge.
In García Márquez’s works “dentists, pharmacists, nurses, midwives, indigenous healers, massage therapists, teguas, shamans, charlatans, blacamanes and nomadic snake-catchers also appear,” as can be read in the synopsis of the book made in partnership with Coosalud and Fundación Coontigo. The origin of the smell of bitter almonds in Love in the time of cholera –a consequence of the suicide by cyanide poisoning of the character Jeremiah de Saint Amour–, the diabetes test in The colonel has no one to write to himthe signs of the hanged man in Litterthe autopsy of Santiago Nasar in A Chronicle of a Death Foretoldthe concoctions and drinks of Ursula Iguarán in One Hundred Years of Solitudethe medical history collected on Simon Bolivar in The general in his labyrinthas well as forensic findings, medical procedures, cholera or insomnia plagues, home remedies with indigenous roots or products of European medicine stand out in this novel study for their entertaining nature and exhaustiveness.
García Márquez’s relationship with medicine – or, more broadly, with human knowledge and the porosity between the different fields – is more than evident to many readers (other authors have focused on astronomical, psychiatric, geographical, etc. aspects). And as is well known, literary studies have never lacked analyses of his work of an academic or specialized nature, generally aimed at university readers. What De la Gala proposes, as a forensic anthropologist whose activities have focused on the study of bone remains from ancient graves, is to go to the source – or one of the many –, knocking on people’s doors and stepping into some places behind the characters and fictions, in the work of a chronicler and historian (De la Gala has also been a professor of the history of medicine and nursing), of an essayist and detective reader.
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The result, in a prose that is clearer than clinical, is a text that includes several portraits of real doctors, such as the aforementioned Barbosa –support of the doctor of Litter–, the Mohabbed Tebbal behind the Octavio Giraldo, of The colonel has no one to write to him, or the doctors in charge of caring for Bolívar’s health and agony. There are unexpected parts such as the glossary of archaisms, indigenisms and biomedical Americanisms, and a chapter –of the fourteen in the book– dedicated to medical aphorisms related to physiology, illness, love, medical activity, eschatology, old age and death, taken from the novels.
If Vladimir Nabokov drew the shapes of the insect that Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into or was concerned with the architectural aspect of the St. Petersburg train station created by Tolstoy to see in depth what its authors were saying, De la Gala makes the ‘lifting’ of Santiago Nasar’s corpse to appreciate for the second time the stab wounds and the wounds of the mortal cuts. The book includes illustrative drawings with a ventral and dorsal perspective of the body, the visceral injuries and the hypothetical map of the lividity alongside the medical and narrative account, and illustrations of the murder weapons reproduced by the Cordoban Jesús Zurita.
“In the history of literature there is no autopsy report included,” as in A Chronicle of a Death Foretoldsays De la Gala, who for three years was a coroner in the northern mountains of the province of Huelva. In that book “what is striking is that the order in which the information is presented is the canonical order in an autopsy,” he adds, days after giving an inaugural lecture at an international medical congress in Barranquilla. At this event he entertained an auditorium full of rheumatologists with images of Nasar’s autopsy and a clinical history of García Márquez – included in the index of the book – in which he is asked if he has any discomfort or pain. The patient writer answers: “Discomfort yes, the pain will come later.”
In the recently released images from the Netflix adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitudea sequence is observed in a shop with shelves full of pharmaceutical bottles, and in the foreground a copper caduceus to which we could add the granatario, the Hippocratic oath and other elements of the Garcia Marquez pharmacopoeia. The reader of this book can follow that same route in a deluxe edition accompanied by numerous graphics, unpublished archive photos and exclusive images by the photographer Danilo Perdomo, taken in the old Farmacia Nueva Arturo Cerón F., built in republican style at the beginning of the 20th century in Honda, Tolima.
“We are ultimately celebrating Gabo’s journalistic rigor, because he knew, like a good journalist, how to go to the documentation or to the professional to get advice on these kinds of issues,” says De la Gala. His suspicions as a student that behind García Márquez’s texts there were consultations with a novelist reporter were correct: gynecologists, pediatricians, forensic doctors or general practitioners received calls from the writer at any time to resolve or guide his arguments. A doctor’s intuition? Maybe. Because it was Dr. Barbosa from the corner pharmacy in Aracataca, opposite the current Gabriel García Márquez House Museum, who told the writer’s family, exasperated by his childish fabrications: “The lies of children are signs of great talent.”
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